BLOCKS; Freedom Tower's 'Unique' Corners Found on Other Drawing Boards

By David W. Dunlap

Published: August 25, 2005

''I DIDN'T know what the word chamfer meant,'' Gov. George E. Pataki confessed in June, ''until I first had the chance to sit down with David and hear what he has done to create this unique element to set this building apart.''

''David'' is David M. Childs, a consulting partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. ''This building'' is the revised Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site, which the governor was unveiling at the time. And ''chamfer'' describes a beveled or cutaway corner, which the new 1,776-foot Freedom Tower has abundantly.

''Unique'' is another matter.

It turns out that a number of buildings and building projects -- including one or two in Skidmore's own portfolio -- have been designed with chamfered, tapering corners that create a multifaceted obelisk form out of isosceles triangles. No one is accusing Mr. Childs of appropriating this idea. But neither can he be said to have originated it.

''In any given moment in the history of various arts, things are in the air,'' said Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture. ''So people in different parts of the world often come to very similar solutions.''

Mr. Stern allowed that he had felt a ''momentary frisson'' on June 29 when he saw images of the revised Freedom Tower design on the Web. It bears a resemblance to the unbuilt 1,030-foot Pennsylvania Plaza project in Philadelphia, designed in 2000 by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and illustrated in a monograph of the firm's work.

Mr. Childs said he had never seen that monograph.

Rather, he said, the form of the Freedom Tower evolved logically from the building program, which called for smaller floors in the upper reaches of the building than those at the base. The cutaway corners, he said, paid subtle homage to the chamfered edges of the original trade center towers, which gave the pair an especially luminous outline.

Because only the corners taper, not the sides, the tower will appear from some directions to be almost perfectly rectangular, proportioned like one of the lost twins and just as tall. But from oblique angles, that evocative shape will give way to a gentle slope.

NEVER hesitant -- in fact, quite learned -- about citing historical antecedents for his own work, Mr. Childs mentioned Cleopatra's Needle, the Washington Monument and Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square as he described the new Freedom Tower.

''Iconic things tend to be simple,'' he said. And recurrent.

Carolina Y.C. Woo and Roger F. Duffy of Skidmore applied the tapering chamfer in 1994 to proposals for a 1,653-foot tower in the Wangjing City project in Beijing. (Another version had a bold diagonal grid and dramatically crimped corners that made it look like a precursor to the Hearst Tower by Foster & Partners, now under construction at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street.)

In the 1980's, Harry Weese of Chicago was experimenting with the form in a project for a supertall building. In the 1990's, William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates gave the form a curve in his design for the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center.

And all these towers might be thought of as owing a debt to the 233-foot lighthouse at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which was rebuilt after World War II.

But the search for architectural provenance is more than an academic exercise. In some cases, it has become a high-stakes pursuit.

Thomas Shine, an architect in Brookline, Mass., is suing Mr. Childs and Skidmore in federal court. He has charged them with copying the earlier Freedom Tower design, unveiled in 2003, from two of Mr. Shine's student projects of 1999, which Mr. Childs had an opportunity to see and admire as a jurist at the Yale School of Architecture.

Mr. Shine registered his work with the Copyright Office in 2004.

Skidmore insisted that the Freedom Tower design was an independent creation that differed substantially from Mr. Shine's projects, challenged the accuracy of several of his exhibits, questioned Mr. Shine's copyright claim and said that any similarities involved ideas, unoriginal material and functional elements that cannot be copyrighted.

On Aug. 10, however, Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey ruled that the lawsuit could proceed, saying that a lay observer ''might find that the Freedom Tower's twisting shape and undulating diamond-shaped facade make it substantially similar'' to one of Mr. Shine's projects and ''therefore an improper appropriation.''

To date, the Zeckendorf family has not announced plans to sue over the use of the name ''Freedom Tower,'' which the developer William Zeckendorf Sr. proposed in 1956 for a 1,750-foot structure in the West 30's.

William Lie Zeckendorf, one of his grandsons, recalled little about that unbuilt project other than the identity of the architectural firm working on the site at the time the first Freedom Tower was announced. It was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Photos: Tapering corners were used in the design of the Freedom Tower, left, and those elements were included in proposals for office towers in Philadelphia, second from left, and Beijing. All the designs seemed to owe something to the builder of the lighthouse at Cap Ferrat in France. (Photo by Jock Pottle/Esto); (Photo by Robert A.M. Stern Architects); (Photo by Jock Pottle/Esto); (Photo by www.phareland.com)